Poetry Movements and Groups

This Poetry Movements and Groups section is an educational source of information and inspiration. Here you will find information on poetry movements, eras, groups and communities of our time and times past. We are expanding this resource daily so that each poetry movement section will contain up to date information.

British Poetry Revival

Castalian band (act. 1584–1603) is the name, derived from a spring on Mount Parnassus sacred to the muses, that was given to the group of poets at the Edinburgh court of James VI and I who contributed to that king's cultural programme in the period preceding the union of the Scottish and English crowns in 1603. The broad aims and ideals of the coterie are contained in the king's own Essayes of a Prentise in the Divine Arte of Poesie (1584).

Cavalier Poets is a broad description of a school of English poets of the 17th century, who came from the classes that supported King Charles I during the English Civil War. The Cavalier poets' existence was because King Charles was a connoisseur of the fine arts and therefore demanded their creation, i.e. masques, poetry, and drama.[1] Charles needed these poets to create that which he craved, fine art. These poets in turn grouped themselves with the King and his service, thus becoming Cavalier Poets.

Classicism or classical poetry echoes the forms and values of classical antiquity. Favouring formal, restrained forms, it has recurred in various Neoclassical schools since the eighteenth century Augustan poets such as Alexander Pope. Pure Neoclassicism has disappeared gradually, however,the poet Richard Wilbur most closely resembling Neoclassicism's emphasis on technical polish and restraint.

Conceptual

Century:
21th

A literary movement, self-described by its practitioners as an act of 'uncreative writing.

Concrete

Century:
20th

Works of concrete poetry are as much pieces of visual art made with words as they are poems.

Confessional

Century:
20th

The confessional poetry of the mid-twentieth century dealt with subject matter that previously had not been openly discussed in American poetry.

Confessionalists

Century:
20th

The Confessionalists were American poets that emerged in the 1950s. They drew on personal history for their artistic inspiration.

Cowboy

Century:
20th

It is a jazz of Irish storytelling, Scottish seafaring and cattle tending.

The Danrin school favored the usage of plain language, everyday subjects, and the use of humor.

Dark Room Collective

Century:
20th

The mission of the Collective was to form a community of established and emerging African American writers. It was the sustaining practice of writing in community just as much as the activism of building a community-based reading series for writers of color.

Ethnopoetics

Century:
20th

An attempt to hear and read the poetries of distant others, outside the Western tradition as we know it now.

Fireside

Century:
19th

The Fireside Poets (also known as the Schoolroom or Household Poets) were a group of 19th-century American poets from New England. The group is usually described as comprising Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Cullen Bryant, John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr..

Fugitives

Century:
20th

They were preoccupied with defending the traditional values of the agrarian South against the effects of urban industrialization.

It promoted extreme artistic innovation and experimentation, declaring a radical disassociation from the past and a focus on new art, technology, and politics.

Harlem Renaissance

Century:
20th

The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural movement in the 1920s involving many African-American writers from the New York Neighbourhood of Harlem.

Hungry Generation

Century:
20th

The Hungry generation was a group of about 40 poets in West Bengal, India during 1961–1965 who revolted against the colonial canons in Bengali poetry and wanted to go back to their roots.

Imagists

Century:
20th

The Imagists were (predominantly young) poets working in England and America in the early 20th century, including F. S. Flint, T. E. Hulme, and Hilda Doolittle (known primarily by her initials, H.D.). They rejected Romantic and Victorian conventions, favoring precise imagery and clear, non-elevated language.

Kanaka Maoli

Language

Century:
20th

The Language poets were avant garde poets from the last quarter of the 20th century. Their approach started with the modernist emphasis on method. They were reacting to the poetry of the Black Mountain and Beat poets

Martian

Century:
20th

The Martian poets were English poets of the 1970s and early 1980s. Through the heavy use of curious, exotic, and humorous metaphors, Martian poetry aimed to break the grip of "the familiar" in English poetry, by describing ordinary things as if through the eyes of a Martian.

The metaphysical poets is a term coined by the poet and critic Samuel Johnson to describe a loose group of British lyric poets of the 17th century, whose work was characterized by the inventive use of conceits, and by speculation about topics such as love or religion. These poets were not formally affiliated; most of them did not even know or read each other.

Misty

Century:
20th

From the Beijing Spring of 1979 until the student uprisings of 1989 a new generation of poets flourished in China.

Modernismo

Century:
20th

Practicioners of modernismo often set their poems in exotic landscapes dotted with swans, peacocks, lilies, princesses, and other symbols of nobility and aristocracy.

Modernist

Century:
19th

Modernist poetry is a broad term for poetry written between 1890 and 1970 in the tradition of Modernism. Schools within it include Imagism and the British Poetry Revival.

Negritude

Century:
20th

The movement is marked by its rejection of European colonization and its role in the African diaspora.

New Formalism

Century:
20th

The New Formalism is a late-twentieth and early twenty-first century movement in American poetry that promotes a return to metrical and rhymed verse.

The New York School was an informal group of poets active in 1950s New York City whose work was said to be a reaction to the Confessionalists.

Objectivists

Century:
20th

The Objectivists were a loose-knit group of second-generation Modernists from the 1930s. They include Louis Zukofsky, Lorine Niedecker, Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, and Basil Bunting. Objectivists treated the poem as an object; they emphasised sincerity, intelligence, and the clarity of the poet's vision.

Parnassians

Century:
19th

The Parnassians were a group of late 19th-century French poets, named after their journal, the Parnasse contemporain. They included Charles Leconte de Lisle, Théodore de Banville, Sully-Prudhomme, Paul Verlaine, François Coppée, and José María de Heredia. In reaction to the looser forms of romantic poetry, they strove for exact and faultless workmanship, selecting exotic and classical subjects, which they treated with rigidity of form and emotional detachment.

Pastoralism was originally a Hellenistic form, that romanticized rural subjects to the point of unreality. Later pastoral poets, such as Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, and William Wordsworth, were inspired by the classical pastoral poets.

Romanticism started in late 18th century Western Europe. Wordsworth's and Coleridge's 1798 publication of Lyrical Ballads is considered by some as the first important publication in the movement. Romanticism stressed strong emotion, imagination, freedom within or even from classical notions of form in art, and the rejection of established social conventions. It stressed the importance of "nature" in language and celebrated the achievements of those perceived as heroic individuals and artists.

San Francisco Renaissance

Century:
20th

They were consciously experimental and had close links to the Black Mountain and Beat poets.

Slam

Century:
20th

Often highly politicized, drawing upon racial, economic, and gender injustices as well as current events for subject manner.

Surrealism

Century:
20th

The surrealists desired to open the vistas of the arts through the close observation of the dream state and the free play of thought.

Symbolism started in the late nineteenth century in France and Belgium. It included Paul Verlaine, Tristan Corbière, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stéphane Mallarmé. Symbolists believed that art should aim to capture more absolute truths which could be accessed only by indirect methods. They used extensive metaphor, endowing particular images or objects with symbolic meaning. They were hostile to "plain meanings, declamations, false sentimentality and matter-of-fact description".

The Movement

Century:
20th

The Movement was a group of English writers whose tone is anti-romantic and rational. The connection between the poets was described as "little more than a negative determination to avoid bad principles."